What better guide could we have to the 2008 financial crisis and its resolution than our newest Nobel Laureate in Economics, the prolific columnist and author Paul Krugman? In his prescient 1999 classic, The Return of Depression Economics, Krugman surveyed the economic crises that had swept across Asia and Latin America and pointed out that they were a warning for all of us: like diseases that have become resistant to antibiotics, the economic maladies that caused the Great Depression were making a comeback. But now depression economics has come to America. When the great housing bubble of the mid-2000s burst, the U.S. financial system proved as vulnerable as those of developing countries caught up in earlier crises and a replay of the 1930s seems all too possible.
In this new, greatly updated edition of The Return of Depression Economics, Krugman shows how the failure of regulation to keep pace with an increasingly out-of-control financial system set the United States and the world up for the greatest financial crisis since the 1930s. He also lays out the steps that must be taken to contain the crisis and turn around a world economy sliding into a deep recession. Brilliantly crafted in Krugman's trademark style lucid, lively, and supremely informed this new edition of The Return of Depression Economics will become an instant cornerstone of the debate over how to respond to the crisis.
Are you afraid we're headed back to the past and the Great Depression? Don Leslie will pull you right to the edge of your seat with his rendering of Krugman's second iteration of his primer on global economics since the beginning of the twentieth century. Leslie sounds more like Krugman than Krugman--a real audio pro. And Krugman's terrific writing is oh-so beautifully complemented by this superb narrator's sense of timing and proportion. Close your eyes and you're in a Princeton lecture hall listening to a Nobel Prize winner. This book is for anyone interested in how we got here and how we might get ourselves out of this mess. It's likely to become a cornerstone of college curricula dealing with world economics. M.C. (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine
